Heritage Expert

Mike Gonzalez

The Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation

Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them reporting from Europe, Asia and Latin America. He left journalism to join the administration of President George W. Bush, where he was speechwriter for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox before moving on to the State Department’s European Bureau, where he wrote speeches and Op-Eds.

Gonzalez, who joined Heritage as Vice President of Communications in March 2009, became a senior research fellow in June, 2014. In his new capacity he has written on Hong Kong, China and Latin America.

Gonzalez was born in Cuba and left at age 12 in 1972. He also has lived in Belgium, France, Spain, Hong Kong and South Korea and has spent months living in and reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Panama and Cyprus, among others.

Gonzalez got his first regular reporting beat in 1980, covering high school sports for one summer for the The Boston Herald. He went to work for Agence France-Presse in 1987, reporting from around the globe for the news agency for six years. After taking off two years to earn an MBA from Columbia Business School, he next logged 11 years with The Wall Street Journal, writing a column on the stock market in New York before being posted to Hong Kong in 1995 as deputy editor of the editorial pages of the newspaper’s Asia edition.

Gonzalez went to Brussels in 1998 to assume similar duties for The Journal's Europe edition. He conceived of and commissioned the “Letter of Eight,” a January 2003 piece by Britain’s Tony Blair, Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and five other European leaders in support of the U.S. stance on Iraq. Published globally, the Letter of Eight galvanized a pro-American coalition that for the first time challenged France and Germany for leadership of the European Union.

Gonzalez holds a bachelor's degree in communications from Boston’s Emerson College and an MBA from Columbia Business School. Fluent in Spanish and French, he reads Italian and Portuguese.

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